Chewbacca's Blog

This concerns Battlestar Galactica, series 2. Look away now if you want to avoid spoilers.

Read more »

...though I may have spelled that slightly wrong.

“Over 2000 participants took part in the survey, and were asked what best described their view of the origin and development of life:

* 22% chose creationism
* 17% opted for intelligent design
* 48% selected evolution theory
* and the rest did not know.”

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Britons unconvinced on evolution
And I was holding out for us having something left to be proud of.

YouTube - Resident Evil: Inappropriate Touching

Those phishing scammers are getting really lazy...

OK - I goofed. I wasn't comparing “Very High” with “High” textures in the previous post, I was comparing “Very High” with “Medium” - and moreover, I had different enhancements running on each machine. Even worse, I didn't have the “Very High” dat installed, so I was comparing “High” with “Medium”.

So, to fix that - here's a new screen shot in proper “Very High” with a section of the image replaced by a “High” bit. I took the screenshots as BMPs using FRAPS to avoid JPEG compression artifacts and saved them as PNGs.



See if you can guess which bit was replaced... (read more for the answer).

Read more »

AC patch day today. In which the “very high” textures were made available. On first blush, there were the usual dissenting views, but from where I'm sitting they're fairly noticeably improved. Bit of a boo-boo - I was running “medium” textures on the second machine.

Here it is...

Apparently, this shower beat the Kaisers to my home town's Rock Band of the Year award.

So, here's the video for ˇForward, Russia!'s “12”. Not entirely sold on the vocals, but the gee-tar is nice.

Additional: XFM session.

...the terrorists win!

Apparently, it has taken Microsoft so long to come up with a new version of Windows, they've had to extend their support for the previous version:

“So for the consumer versions of Windows XP, mainstream support was going to end on December 31, 2006 and there was no guarantee of any security hot-fixes beyond that time. Microsoft has now extended the mainstream support deadline for the consumer versions to an undefined date that is two years after the release of the follow-on operating system.”

SANS - Internet Storm Center - Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System

...because even when they are, there's some wierd interpretations of it going on in America:

“"To me these children are the answers to the prayers we all have for peace," said Doreen Virtue, a former psychotherapist for adolescents who now writes books and lectures on indigo children. She calls the indigos a leap in human evolution. "They're vigilant about cleaning the earth of social ills and corruption, and increasing integrity," Ms. Virtue said. "Other generations tried, but then they became apathetic. This generation won't, unless we drug them into submission with Ritalin."”

Are They Here to Save the World? - New York Times

With the ol' Linux box running over WiFi I ran into a problem I'd suspected was either down to the laptop or the access point. This meant it was the Netgear DG834g v2 - So I dropped Netgear a support question about it:

If I transfer any large file (larger than, say 20mb) from the wired PC to either of the other machines (or vice versa) the transfer will always fail over my LAN when using MS networking. If I use an FTP connection to the Fedora machine, the transfer will sometimes fail.

Their reply:

Regarding your concern, please assign static IP with DNS addresses to all your computers.

Soooo... I assume this means the router's DCHP, which is supposed to assign IPs (fixed, in my case by MAC), doesn't quite cut it...

“Axe wielders get ready to rock, because Red Octane has today confirmed that Guitar Hero will be released in the UK and "selected European territories" on April 7th.”

News - Guitar Hero coming to Europe // PlayStation 2 /// Eurogamer

Neowin has a couple of screenshots of the confirmed skin MS will be using in Windows Vista. It looks like, to the thanks of adults everywhere, they've decided to drop that Fisher-Price “My Computer” crap from the interface.

...and is still beaten into 13th place in the sales charts:

“Dead or Alive 4 didn't crack the top ten, selling something like 60,000 copies and coming in at #13. Disappointing, sure, but the game has sold better than any other Xbox title in Japan. Ever. Personally, I *heart* DoA 4, and think the game is the 360's first truly enjoyable experience. Think Crecente agrees with me on that. If there's anything to be learned from the DS sell-out, it's that folks will shell out and buy the system... as long as there's exceptional software there. People buy systems to play games on, not games to play systems on.”

DoA 4 Misses Top Ten Spot in Japanese Software Rankings - Kotaku

“Meanwhile, Nintendo has once again drawn controversy by announcing that its upcoming console, the Nintendo Apocalypse, will lack any sort of game controller whatsoever. Instead, you will direct the onscreen action by grabbing a household pet by the front legs and "making it do a little dance." Gamers reacted with shock and disbelief, but Nintendo faithful pointed out that this will still be better than a gamepad for first-person shooters.”

Wired News: Game Year in Review: 2010

She could have just read any one of the other books for the plot...

“JK Rowling panicked after losing a notebook containing plot details for the final Harry Potter novel.”

Digital Spy: JK Rowling lost Potter plot details

(the year being 2002)

“Arctic Monkeys have pleaded with their fans not to distribute their forthcoming album over the Internet after it was leaked ahead of release.”

Arctic Monkeys bid to stop album leak - Music news - Music - Virgin.net

“It all came about for the Monkeys when a 22 track CDR was leaked and spread onto the magical world of the internet and into the homes of music lovers around England - and ever since then the Monkey craze began. Week by week, more people picked up on them and they eventually became Britain's worst kept secret. Headline shows sold out with people buying tickets for £160 outside venues (£9 face value...) and last time I checked on eBay, their demo CDs were being sold for over £200! And all before any singles have been officially released!”

Aced Magazine : Arctic Monkeys - I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor

We have several servers running various versions of Apache and PHP. When one or other of them needs to be upgraded, I can't seem to think of a way to do it without losing the server for a while. The problem is that PHP needs to be compiled against an installed Apache, and a newly upgraded Apache throws errors if the existing PHP module is not compiled against it.

This means that, when you make install the newly compiled upgrade of Apache, you get a bunch of these in the error_log whilst the server refuses to serve:

[Wed Jan  4 12:08:59 2006] [notice] child pid 25162 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

But only now can you compile PHP and install it, and then restart Apache.

You can shut down the server during this of course, but that puts you with a broken site for a bit...

Update: reading helps I found out to compile mod_perl using apxs. Also played around with mod_ssl - $300 for a certificate! Oi vey...

Installing PHP SAPI module:       apache
[activating module `php4' in /usr/local/apache.live/conf/httpd.conf]
cp libs/libphp4.so /usr/local/apache.live/libexec/libphp4.so
chmod 755 /usr/local/apache.live/libexec/libphp4.so
cp /usr/local/apache.live/conf/httpd.conf /usr/local/apache.live/conf/httpd.conf.bak
cp /usr/local/apache.live/conf/httpd.conf.new /usr/local/apache.live/conf/httpd.conf
rm /usr/local/apache.live/conf/httpd.conf.new
Installing PHP CLI binary:        /usr/local/bin/
Installing PHP CLI man page:      /usr/local/man/man1/
Installing PEAR environment:      /usr/local/lib/php/
[PEAR] Archive_Tar    - already installed: 1.1
[PEAR] Console_Getopt - already installed: 1.2
requires package `XML_RPC' >= 1.4.0
[PEAR] PEAR: PEAR: Dependencies failed
[PEAR] HTML_Template_IT- already installed: 1.1
[PEAR] Net_UserAgent_Detect- already installed: 2.0.1
[PEAR] XML_RPC        - upgraded:  1.4.0

“Good Omens is being reissued in the US in February, in hardcover for the first time since 1990 and with a new introduction, Frequently Asked Questions, a piece on Terry by me and a piece on me by Terry. It will be coming out in an edition with two different covers, to ensure that people who can only find the G shelves in bookshops have an equal chance of finding it to the ones who only know about the Ps.”

Neil Gaiman

Anyone fancy a light snack?

In the year 2006 I resolve to: Teach my dog to fly. Get your resolution here

Try and do spins in the air but land upright for the boost. Via VideoCrab.

DOFI-BLOG

fo' shizzle.